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Senior Platform Engineer, GCP & AI Infrastructure

Compensation: $250K + equity

Location: San Mateo, California [Hybrid]

Join an early-stage AI company building technology to make housing and urban development more sustainable, efficient, and equitable.

The global demand for housing is growing, but the way buildings and cities are planned needs to evolve. This company is developing novel AI solutions that help cities, architects, and developers make faster, more informed decisions about the built environment.

Working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, software engineering, and deep industry expertise, the team is tackling complex challenges across building performance, sustainability, and large-scale development. This is an opportunity to join a high-calibre technical team and help shape the infrastructure of an ambitious company at an early stage.

The Role

We are hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to build and own the cloud foundations that support the company’s AI, software, and data products.

This is a broad, hands-on platform role spanning cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, security, observability, CI/CD, data orchestration, and developer productivity. You will act as the primary architect of the company’s Google Cloud environment, ensuring systems remain secure, scalable, observable, and easy for engineering teams to use.

You will work closely with AI engineers, software engineers, and domain experts to create a platform that enables rapid, reliable deployment while meeting the security expectations of enterprise customers. You will also help develop reproducible and traceable data pipelines, supporting the delivery of production-grade AI systems.

What You’ll Do

• Own and evolve the company’s Google Cloud infrastructure and overall platform architecture.
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Design scalable Terraform modules and establish robust approaches to state management.
• Lead the technical implementation of cloud security and compliance requirements.
• Harden cloud environments and embed security throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Build and improve observability across infrastructure, applications, and data workflows.
• Streamline CI/CD pipelines to increase deployment velocity without compromising reliability.
• Improve developer tooling, platform usability, and engineering productivity.
• Contribute to the design and development of the company’s data orchestration layer.
• Ensure data workflows are reproducible, traceable, secure, and scalable.
• Design infrastructure for multi-tenant environments where data isolation is critical.
• Create internal tooling and automation using Python.
• Help establish platform engineering standards and best practices as the company scales.

What You’ll Bring

• Strong experience designing and operating production environments on Google Cloud Platform.
• Deep expertise in Terraform and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Experience managing Terraform modules, environments, and state at scale.
• A security-first mindset, with a track record of hardening cloud infrastructure.
• Experience supporting security compliance initiatives and enterprise customer requirements.
• Strong knowledge of modern observability practices and tooling.
• Experience designing secure, multi-tenant systems with strict data separation.
• Familiarity with modern data platforms, ELT orchestration, data lineage, and data observability.
• Proficiency in Python for automation, scripting, or internal platform tooling.
• The ability to work across infrastructure, security, data, and developer experience.
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative, pragmatic approach to engineering.

Experience in an early-stage company or another environment with rapidly changing requirements would be particularly valuable.

Tech Stack

• Google Cloud Platform
• Terraform
• Python
• CI/CD tooling
• Cloud security and compliance tooling
• Modern observability platforms
• ELT and data orchestration tools
• Data lineage and data observability tooling
• Multi-tenant cloud infrastructure

Why Join?

You will have significant ownership over the systems, standards, and technical decisions that shape the company’s engineering platform.

Rather than maintaining a mature platform with a narrow remit, you will build core infrastructure from the ground up and solve meaningful problems across cloud architecture, security, developer experience, and data systems.

You will work alongside experienced AI engineers, software engineers, scientists, and industry specialists on technology with the potential to improve how cities and buildings are planned around the world.

This is a rare opportunity to combine deep platform engineering work with tangible real-world impact, while helping an early-stage business scale its technology, team, and customer base.

About People In AI

People In AI is a specialist recruitment partner for artificial intelligence, machine learning, data, and emerging technology companies. We connect exceptional technical talent with organisations building ambitious, high-impact products.

We are committed to creating an inclusive recruitment process and welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds. If this role sounds exciting but you do not meet every listed requirement, we still encourage you to apply.